THE

LIBERTARIAN

ENTERPRISE

Letters To The Editor

From TLE #73 I conclude that Mr. Bates (aka "Minority Mike") has no
clue about the concept of rights. His statement "Listen up, Elian
Gonzalez is an illegal alien, he HAS no rights in the United States!"
clearly reveals so. Let me draw an analogy: "Listen up, David Koresh
was an illegal gun owner, he HAD no rights in the United States!"
Better yet, if some government passes a law that all Jews must wear
yellow stars and be confined to ghettos... "Listen up, he is an
illegal Jew, he HAS no rights!" Hmmm, where I've heard that before?

I have a simple question for Mr. Bates: can you name a specific person
Elian harmed (or, to be more precise, initiated force against)? No?
Case closed. Violating the "make-believe" (as Vin Suprynovicz aptly
described them) immigration laws can not be a crime in Libertarian
view... unless you somehow believe that rights are additive - that is
(for Mr. Bates, in case his wife is not immediately available), a
bunch of folks somehow has more rights than an individual. But then
again, subscribing to that latter doctrine disqualifies you from being
a Libertarian (see The Covenant of Unanimous Consent by L. Neil
Smith).

I hope Mr. Bates appreciates all the help his wife offers him with
those big words. Now, if she could only help him to understand the
concept of rights, it would be a giant leap forward.

PS I do not approve of preferential treatment of Elian, but neither I
approve of the current immigration policy.

To the editor [re:TLE #74]:

As a recent emigrant from Arizona, I have some familiarity with the
uncompromising positions taken by the "pistis" faction of Arizona
libertarians.

Arizona's ballot recently included a second referendum on medical
legalization of marijuana and other non-traditional drugs of DEA
interest. A successful ballot issue two years before had passed but
had been crippled by the legislature, necessitating a second appeal to
the voters to restore what they'd originally approved.

The state distributed booklets to voters explaining the ballot issues.
The booklet also included the positions of various groups on the
issues (if the groups paid a fee). The affiliated Arizona Libertarian
Party included a statement opposing the medical legalization ballot
issue on the grounds that the state had no authority to criminalize
the drugs in the first place. From a principled standpoint, I think
they were correct -- but the rightness of their principle did nothing
to restore the lost right.

Many states have passed "shall-issue" laws requiring issue permits for
concealed carry of weapons to any person not otherwise disqualified.
Absolutists oppose such laws as infringing the right to bear arms
(guaranteed in, not granted by, the Second Amendment).

Pragmatists support shall-issue permit laws as advancing safety and
public acceptance. The work of John Lott and other statisticians have
shown that crime declines where permits are legal. The "million moms"
and others who would ban privately-held guns must now contend against
cold statistical proof that those privately-held guns are saving
lives. Without permit laws, the studies would not and could not exist.

Some libertarians are such principled advocates of freedom that their
beliefs deny them the ability to win freedom. In refusing to consider
any incremental approach to regaining freedom, they ensure that, while
practicing freedom personally and covertly, they will never restore it
as a public practice to the nation as a whole. They are similar to the
libertarians who refuse to vote on the grounds that winning an
election would impose their will and initiate force on others. Both
groups are principled, and both advance liberty within small groups of
like-minded thinkers, but neither group will change the state. Change
requires a willingness to accept incremental victories. Our freedoms
did not erode overnight, and they will not be restored in an instant.
The pragmatic libertarians may be impure, but their methods hold the
best chances of success.

Hi. For a limited time, I'm offering lifetime email addresses at
Liberty4me.com, to be forwarded to the email account of your choice.
Should you decide to change internet providers, your email will follow
you. I'm requesting a (completely optional) $1 per year donation to
help cover domain name charges. If you're interested, please send
email to theshadow@liberty4me.com

Thanks,
John Hoffman

Mr. Taylor,

Michael Haggard asked (lamented?) where are the hordes of libertarians
who practice freedom? Partly, they are not here. Being self
responsible has never been popular - if it had been, we wouldn't need
to be fighting so hard.

There are people who have unregistered guns, do their own work without
getting permits, who work jobs off the books, who live free. Of
necessity and personality, they do not advertise. If you start talking
about your guns, BATF shows up. If you brag of rewiring your hourse,
the local inspectors show up with a sheriff's deputy. Grey market
work? State and Federal IRS agents - with or without calculators and
guns.

Part of the big problem that the libertarians have is that we are not
groupies. We are inclined to not join, to not organize. We survive and
win - for a while - when everything falls apart because the center
cannot hold, but as long as we are left alone, we are content to leave
others alone. By the time they come to the door, we are isolated.

The Internet has helped - and it helps that on specific issues,
non-libertarians who do organize help defeat evil ideas. The long
range problem is to teach others to think and live as we do.

So, the free people are out here. Always have been, always will be.
Hopefully, this time, we will do more than fight a holding war. But
don't expect organized public displays of civil disobedience. Not yet,
anyway.

Thanks for reading my article and responding. You are absolutely
right. Right on the button. However, the LP is a group... and it seems
that it is a group that disavows any individual activism. Disobey the
government and watch LP support from the Watergate dry up rather
quickly. There are a great many of individual Libertarians that do act
and live free. I feel that the party, as a whole, does not... in
fact... I contend that the party (the LNC) actively distances itself
from individual activists that portray a purist (how I hate the new
moniker) position on the Libertarian Philosophy.

At some point though, the group, the asociated libertarians MUST
oppose, even at great personal cost, the government of oppression. The
official group, the LP and LNC, should be the ones leading the way.
Such in not the case. Sadly, the LP has lost both the big and the
little "L"... it's sad as 'L.

Most articles for this magazine provide very clear articles concerning
a libertarian viewpoint and arguments for it on significant issues.
This newsletter has provided a consistent recourse to me from today's
media that walks hand in hand with the government. Noam Chomsky makes
more sense to me every day.

Neil, in his first book, THE PROBABILITY BROACH, pointed out that the
Constitution was "forced down the throat" of North America's colonial
governments. I think that it's kind of strange that, in this magazine
published by him, the legitimacy of the Constitution seems to be
endorsed.

My main argument against it, however, does not concern its origins. It
concerns this indisputable fact: (almost certainly) no one who is
currently alive signed the document.

Why should something our ancestors or someone else's signed govern our
lives? I don't see how this differs from a government that does not
even have the pretense of being a sort of kind of almost elected
representative republic.

In NO TREASON, Lysander Spooner argues this point quite eloquently. I
suggest that anyone who believes that the Constitution is a
"legitimate" decider of what government forces itself on America read
it.

I realize that, in a society with any form of government, a Bill of
Rights is needed to protect any measure of the people's safety from
the government. But I don't see any reason why anyone alive today
should accept the Constitution. If there is a bill of rights, it had
better be stronger, this time.

Take out "well - regulated militia" and add "ever" to the right to
free speech, press, religion, and assembly for those Oliver Wendell
Holmes types.

The history of the Constitution is very interesting: if you don't know
about it, or public school has fed you it's version, I recommend that
you check up on it.

But even if it was signed UNANIMOUSLY in the states of '89, it would
have no claim on us.

Although I don't have the citations at hand, the US Supreme Court has
repeatedly ruled that an individual right, or the exercise of
individual rights, cannot be licensed, taxed, or otherwise pre-empted.
Usually, this was in the context of localities trying to disuade or at
least make some money off of pamphleteers and evangelists such as
Mormons or Jahovas Whitnesses.

The decisions, however, did not limit themselves to the first
amendment, or any particular amendment or even make the distinction
between enumerated or unenumerated rights.

I propose the following: Before the Emerson decision in Texas, in
which a Federal judge elaborated on the individual nature of the right
to keep and bear arms, is overturned in the SC (or more likely
overturned in the appelate and ignored by the SC), a suit by a(some)
Texan(s) to overturn all firearms licensing and other preemption of
this "right", just as licensing and taxing religion has been
overturned.

While not a Texan, nor enough of a lawyer to know if one can pick and
choose what jurisdiction to file such a suit in, I would gladly
contribute to such an effort.

Is there a lawyer (gag spit) who reads TLE, or someone with the
requisite knowledge to find an attorney for such an endevour?

While I'm not happy with the notion that the owners and managers of
MindSpring have decided that the unlawful statutory enactments of the
U.S. Congress give Internet service providers an excuse to shut down
Web sites based on their servers when the owners and managers of an
ISP decide that they don't like such materials, I think that you've
thoroughly pressed my "fuck you" button by commencing your TLE article
with the complaint that this means "...the Internet will become the
private communication medium of those committed to overthrowing the
knowledge of God on earth."

Internet service providers are, almost one and all, private
enterprises. As such, they *routinely* censor the content of the Web
pages they host simply because their hosting computers are private
property, and they can do with those computers whatever they like (or
whatever the liability and regulatory environment conditions impose
upon them). They deny subscribers access to select newsgroups, and
some of them even "Net Nanny" their subscribers' abilities to connect
with some Web sites. The only reason why ISP managers don't do even
*more* to censor subscribers' access and content providers' Web sites
is the "firehose" phenomenon -- in other words, there's a legitimate
claim that the flow of information across the 'Net is so horrendous
that it's impossible for the officers of an ISP to sift through it
all.

Mostly, therefore, they act upon specific complaints directing their
attention to particular newsgroups or Web sites -- though I'll admit
that they will frequently find occasion to exercise their own
prejudices. That's the nature, however, of people in business. If a
store owner finds the contents of *Penthouse* and *Playboy* more
objectionable than the sales he makes by peddling soft-core
pornography, he's free to tell his distributor *not* to send any more
copies of those magazines. If the operators of MindSpring find the
contents of www.christiangalley.com to be objectionable -- for
*whatever* reason -- they're under no real obligation to carry those
contents on their servers. Most ISP contracts have thoroughly lucid
"out" clauses that give the managers of an ISP plenty of wriggle room
wherein they may unilaterally terminate the provision of their
services to any subscriber.

While I don't think that the Communications Decency Act in any way
empowers the MindSpring people to do what they've done in denying
houseroom to www.christiangalley.com , I *do* believe that the owners
and operators of this ISP were within their rights to have dumped this
Web site from their computers.

Religious freedom isn't the question here. This is a matter of private
property rights. If you don't vociferously object to what's constantly
being done to *real* pariah groups in this country -- like NAMBLA,
whose ISP summarily dumped their Web site at the threat of a bullshit
civil lawsuit last month -- then I can't offer you any more sympathy
than the hope that www.christiangalley.com can find another Internet
service provider whose operators are willing to carry the content
thereof.

The real test of a free speech advocate, y'see, is found in his
willingness to defend freedom of speech for those he most thoroughly
despises. If you're willing to stand publicly against NAMBLA having
suffered the same treatment at the hands of *their* ISP as
www.christiangalley.com sustained in its dealings with MindSpring,
then you're worth some respect. If not, then please peddle your
complaints someplace else.

Internet Service Providers are, at the top of the service chain, the
telecos that control every person's access to Internet and other
telephone services. MindSpring was only one of four ISP's and telecos
who breached contract with me, each one closer to the Internet
backbone, until finally it became clear that, even setting up my own
server and contracting bandwidth from an Internet backbone provider, I
would not be allowed to publish on the Internet. The fact that you do
not understand the tyranny such teleco control can exercise proves you
are fundamentally defective in the fact function.

Your experience with the telecommunications companies is of a piece
with what I've learned about such matters, but it means little enough
as regards "telco control." These are private companies (though
they've been allowed to get away with using government regulatory
measures to restrict market access and thereby stifle competition),
and it simply isn't ethical to try and force them to carry upon their
hardware material which they find objectionable.

As a purely practical aside, consider the possibility that
www.christiangalley.com might find a secure "home" outside the United
States. There are places in the world where the regulatory and tort
law insanities we suffer in this country are the subjects of shocked
disbelief, and where the contents of your Web site will be welcomed
for the dollars that their carriage will bring in. It's much more
difficult for Internet service providers to deny their subscribers
access to a Web site (wherever in the world it might originate) than
it is for them to dump a Web site from their servers.

"Tyranny" has a specific meaning, and I cannot see that you've
adequately supported any contention that what MindSpring (or any other
ISP) has undertaken in its dealings with you can be properly described
as tyrannous. Moreover, I note that you've nothing at all to say about
the broader defense of free speech on the Internet -- the issue of
NAMBLA, f'rinstance.

Shall we then be able to say that you yourself are "defective
in...function" as regards semantics, logic, ethics, and moral
consistency?

Nothwithstanding the fact that the religiously believing mind is a
defective tool from the git-go ("Will of God," indeed!), there are a
couple of considerations that even a person acting upon the
schizophrenic impetus of personal converse with the ineffable should
be able to appreciate:

(1) You don't have to leave the United States in order to find
yourself Web hosting on a server that's beyond the reach of federal
regulators or rapacious members of the American Bar Association.
Whether you desire to "appear melodramatic" or not, finding such a Web
venue for your screeds can be accomplished without stepping outside
your house.

(2) Your contention that ISP officers owe you some consideration
because "the technology they use to conduct business was provided by
American taxpayers" is bloody ludicrous. On the basis of such an
argument, you should be able with equal right to claim whatever you
like of the entire Louisiana Purchase because "American taxpayers"
funded the acquisition of that land back during the Jefferson
Administration. Are you really trying to contend that *no* private
individual is able to act with any security or certainty if his
strivings in any way involve land, technology, or information
originally obtained through the expenditure of government funds? The
Santa Fe Trail was defended by U.S. Army posts during its operation in
the 19th Century. Do you therefore contend that all freight
transported along the Santa Fe Trail -- and all enterprises undertaken
in California as the result of capital goods brought west by way of
the Santa Fe Trail -- were not (and their present fruits *are* not)
private property untrammelled by the calls of "American taxpayers"
like you? Officers of the U.S. government turned funds to the
development and purchase of *lots* of technologies. They paid for the
MIT "Rad Lab" and the advancement of radar imaging. Should you -- one
of the millions of "American taxpayers" -- therefore be empowered to
go to the Amana Corporation and demand of them proprietary information
on the design of their microwave ovens simply because their
engineering is robustly derived from the development work done on the
federal government's dime fifty years ago?

(3) I do not call NAMBLA -- or its publications -- meritorious or
particularly virtuous. Their recent suppression, however, has much in
common with the difficulties you've had in finding Web hosting for
your www.christiangalley.com content, and I find that it's proper to
keep as broad a perspective as possible in the consideration of issues
such as this one. Do you have any objection to the fact that the
officers of NAMBLA have also been having problems finding an ISP? Do
you feel an equal sense of indignation regarding the denial of service
to these people? If not, why not?

One of the things that I find mildly repugnant about participating in
the libertarian political movement is that it puts me in the position
of making common cause with people -- like you -- who act not
primarily on the basis of a logically supported defense of individual
rights and human dignity but rather out of religious impulse.

I submit that anyone who claims to act on the basis of his personal
understanding of the "Will of God" is to be presumed a dangerous
nutcase pending further review. There are no objective standards to
which such an individual can repair, and therefore the difference
between the true believer and the certifiable psychotic is so thin
that there's no practical reason for considering anything other than
whether or not there's sufficient compensation to allow such a person
to cope with reality.

"The consequences of such a sweeping claim are not hard to see. Such
a claim, if it is upheld by the Courts, would make speech on the
Internet subject to the whims of the Internet Service Providers.
Instead of the Internet being a medium for the communication of
individual points of view, the Internet would become the exclusive
domain of the Internet Service Providers. "

Dear Editor,

I have quoted the relevant portion of the message above. It was a
letter to the Editor in TLE #57.

Mr. Horsely's claim above misses one crucial point. And that point is
the difference between public and private property. The First
Amendment states that your right to free speech isn't going to be
infringed. The first amendment doesn't say anything about you being
allowed to spray paint your message on my house.

This is reasoning by analogy but I think the analogy holds up.
Mindspring, Earthlink, AOL and all the rest of the commercial ISPs out
there are just that, commercial businesses renting space on their
computers to us for a fee.

A computer owned by Mindspring is Mindspring's private property. I
have no problem with Mindspring deciding what it will and won't allow
to be displayed on ther computers, the same way I claim editorial
privileges on flags and bumper stickers displayed from my house and
car.

The First Amendment is intended to safeguard the individual's right to
free speech. It doesn't say anywhere that any owner of media or
private property has to display Mr. Horsely's pet ideas.

That is why Mr. Horsely has the right to buy his own server and set up
his own ISP to display his message if he feels strongly enough and is
willing enough to spend his own money on it. Hey, who knows. Perhaps
enough people with similar pet ideas will contribute to help Mr.
Horsely buy his own Server or would be willing to purchase special
Pro-idea service from him to make it a paying proposition.

In any case, complaining about one's free speech being squelched,
going to court to file injunctions and screeching about how there
"ought to be a LAW!", when commercial and monetary solutions to the
problem exist is just the sort of mentality that I read TLE to get
perspective on.

Mr. Horsely's complaint that his rights are being violated because
Mindspring excercises their property rights is fairly typical of the
collectivist, statist mentality that I see growing in our culture and
society.

Instead of beating Mindspring at their own game, by providing internet
service on his own or with the support of other like minded people Mr.
Horsely petitions the Government to *force* Mindspring to play his
way.

Instead of changing the rules of the conflict, by operating his own
server insuring that his message is available to anyone who wants it,
thereby invalidating Mindspring's decision, Mr. Horsely wants the
courts and their minions to make things go his way for him.

At, may I add, the expense of all taxpayers, no matter if they agree
with Mr. Horsely's pet idea or not.

Perhaps Mr. Horsely thinks that because the media labels
Libertarianism as hyper conservative that we readers of TLE will
support his pet idea. It is, after all, the conservative position,
isn't it?

Never mind the cost to liberty or the fact that his pet idea amounts
to telling a little over 50% of our population just what they can and
can't do with their very own selves. Never mind that he is pleading
for us to Help appeal to the courts to jam this pet idea down every
one's throat.

It's inconsistent with my interpreation of Liberty both coming and
going and so yes I do mind it.

I do not object to TLE printing this statist, whiny plea. As a former
editor of a fanzine myself I know that alternative points of view are
treasured for the way they spark conversation, dialog and input from
readers.

Besides, Shoooting at paper targets is still good practice.

But IMHO, Mr. Horsely be very, very happy and content that it was
merely my own amatuer self who elected to respond to this, and very
gently point out the errors in his logic.

Vin Suprynowicz would have roasted Mr. Horsely over a slow fire,
taking all after noon and making sure enough salt got into each wound.
It would be lovely to read.

And I suspect that L Neil Smith might just be thinking of his daughter
and shoot Horsely on the spot. This would make Bill Owens call another
press conference and no one wants that.

So head for the hills Mr. Horsely and hope that you only encounter
frightened teenage girls with too little sense to bully and not a real
Libertarian. They might not initiate violence, but pointing out how
stupid you sound is fair game, I think.

Is it initiating violence to call for a lawsuit to restrict the free
excercise of property rights? Hmmmm...

The respondent missed the point: MindSpring contracted to carry my Web
site on "their" computer. In other words, I paid them money and they
agreed to publish my work on the Internet. Because their "private"
property was leased by me for my business it therefore ceased to be
private and became subject to its contract with me. When they decided
they would not honor their contract with me, I sued them because
contracts are enforceable under law--or are supposed to be. This case
will go a long way toward seeing whether the Courts will enforce
contracts on the Internet.

As for my ability to become my own Internet Service Provider, I tried
that and was censored when Internet backbone providers refused to
allow my server to access the backbone telephone system that is,
essentially, the Internet. So much for your proposed "remedy."

Fact is, the Internet Service Providers use technology whose creation
was funded by the taxpayers of this nation. An interesting book
published by the National Science Foundation entitled "Funding the
Revolution" documents how tax dollars created the infrastructure that
we now call the Internet. Public Service Commissions exist in the
various States because some services were paid for by the American
people; i.e., the Rural Electrification Agency, etc. Those services
have no rightful claim to being called purely "private" and have not
historically been treated as such by the Courts of this nation.